ORIN RYDER – 5150 S1E000 – Review: The Solo RPG for People With No Friends (or No Time)

Originally posted on YouTube on 22 September 2023.

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NAMASTE FROM THE FUTURE MOTHER NUGGETS!

First, a quick word on what’s going on around here. I’m overhauling the website, and while I’m at it, I’m going back through my old YouTube videos and turning them into proper write-ups. Some of these games, like this 5150 campaign, I fully plan to pick back up and keep playing. Before I do, I want the earlier chapters documented properly, all in one place, so that one day I can pull the whole story together from start to finish.

So if you see posts popping up with dates from a few years back, that’s why. Think of it as me tidying up the campaign notes before the next session. Happy days.

Right. Back to the past. On with the show.

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Namaste Mother Nuggets!

I’m going to give this a try. I don’t know how successful I’m going to be, but we’ll give it a go: 5150: New Beginnings, a sci-fi solo role-playing game from Two Hour Wargames, and the game I’m about to sink a whole campaign into.

Have you played any Two Hour Wargames games before? Tell me which one in the comments.

What Is It?

5150: New Beginnings is made by Ed over at Two Hour Wargames (they also make NUTS!, which is a really cool game). If you’ve played any of their stuff, the core system will feel familiar, but New Beginnings takes it and really expands on it in a way I haven’t seen the others do. It makes for a genuinely fun, narrative solo experience.

So if you don’t have any friends, like me (sorry to my friends reading this), or you just don’t have the time to get everyone around a table, this is a game for you.

It’s sci-fi with a cyberpunk-ish flavour. You’re thrust into a busy, bustling city hundreds of years in the future, and your goal is to take your character, your Star, as far as they can go. Fight crime, commit crimes, or something in between. Want to be an interplanetary smuggler or a bounty hunter? Yep. Want to jack your body full of the latest tech and run on the edge? Oh yeah, baby. It’s set on the planet New Hope, but if you want to take it into space, you can. It’s such an open system and I absolutely love it.

How the Dice Work

If you know Two Hour Wargames, this is pretty straightforward. There are basically three ways to roll:

• Versus your rep: roll 2D6 against your reputation and count how many dice pass. You count successes, not totals.
• Read as rolled: sometimes you just need the number on the die.
• Half D6: the old D3.

My one big tip: follow the stop boxes. If you just read the book cover to cover it can feel confusing, but if you work through the stop boxes as you go, everything makes so much more sense. They’re called stop boxes for a reason.

I also have to say, Ed and the team are super friendly. I’ve commented on their YouTube videos and emailed them and got answers straight away, and there are forums too. I’d recommend the company for the support alone.

Stars, Grunts and Average Joes

Your Star is the hero. They get special abilities that let them bend the rules a bit, so they don’t die straight away, and they get some free will. Your Grunts are more like NPCs: kind of AI-controlled, a bit weaker, and they come and go.

There’s a bunch of alien races, each with its own lore and very particular rules: the Grath, big chunky dudes who are pretty scary; the Hishen, the high-tech folks; exotic xenomorph-types; and the ZhuZhus, who are monkeys in space suits. Who’d have thought? I’m going to stick with humans (Basics), because I’m keeping it basic.

The classes are split up in a way I really love:

• Movers and Shakers: the wealthy people, and the people who make things happen.
• Exotics: your action heroes and sci-fi hero types.
• Joes: just average Joes. This is what I’ll be playing.
• Criminal Element: your crims.

Characters also get attributes, plus People and Savvy skills on top of their rep (think charisma versus wits). The goal is to build up your lifetime reputation, so that when you retire you find out whether you’re on welfare, on a pension, or living large in your own mansion.

It’s Not Just Combat

Gear is simple: a few levels of armour, a few levels of weapons. I like to start with nothing and work my way up, because that’s fun for the story.

There are cool little touches too. You can just be home for the month, but there’s still a chance you get robbed. If you’re home, you get to fight them off. If you’re not, they take your stuff and you find out how badly you got ripped off.

There’s cyberware if you’re a cyberpunk fan, psychic powers if you want to go full River from Serenity, and rules for recruiting a crew. And it’s not all fighting: there are skill challenges, NPC interactions, net running if you want to be a hacker, and sweet talking. But if you just want to punch people, that’s an option too.

Tables vs. Cards

Everything is randomly generated. It looks like a lot of tables, and it can get overwhelming for my simple monkey ADHD brain. That’s where the box of cards comes in (I got mine through the Kickstarter, I think). They make life a heck of a lot easier.

Say you’re in the financial district and you draw a card: the drugstore. I have to go get my medicine for my ADHD, right? Roll the dice, and while I’m there I run into an Exotic. Roll again: a police officer. Oh, have I done anything wrong? Flip the card over, roll for how many there are, and their races, weapons and stats are right there on the back.

Now we’ve got a story. He stops me. Am I carrying my weapon? Do I have a licence for it? All because I went to get my medication. Should a guy with ADHD be carrying a weapon? That’s the magic of this game: one random draw and you’re off.

The city map matters too. Every area has a law level, plus a day and a night encounter chance, so some parts of town are much less safe after dark.

Tell me who you fought for in the Cola Wars, by the way. I need to know.

Stories That Build Themselves

Your encounters spin out into job offers, robberies, escort missions, cargo hauls, and each one feeds the next. Fail a job and you’re on a completely different story arc than if you’d nailed it.

The first time I played, I started with a Joe whose goal was to get a spaceship and get off this rock. He went chilling, got a job offer, and ended up running an errand for a crime lord. I failed the delivery. It was not taken well. Suddenly I’m in the bad books with some criminals, I need to recruit more people, and over time I’ve made an enemy of a crime lord. That’s never good in the long run, but you get these really cool little character stories, and that’s what role-playing is all about.

My One Critique

To make every location on the map feel different, each area has its own deck. But that’s a lot of piles of cards. I counted eleven separate piles. Some of them feel like they could easily be one pile. That’s probably just my ADD brain, and if you’re using the tables it’s not a problem at all.

(Spoiler from the future: Ed has an answer for this, and I’ll share it when I make my character.)

Should You Get It?

There’s a whole bunch of expansions too: Known Space for leaving the planet, generating worlds and loads more lore, Friday Night Fights, and more. If you buy the print book you also get battle boards and tokens, and you can print them out yourself with the digital version.

I highly recommend 5150: New Beginnings. Check out Two Hour Wargames, and their YouTube channel too, which has quick rules explanations every time they run a Kickstarter.

I hope it sounds cool, because we’re definitely doing it. Next up: making our character.

Watch the review on YouTube

Ciao for now.

(Note: This post was created transcribing my youtube videos using tools which may include elements of artificial intelligence.)